Family Silences and Storytelling
On using creative fiction writing to explore family histories
Something a little different this time, in part to help me meet my stated aim of posting a new piece of writing every fortnight. I’m also pushing myself to play around a little, to experiment with different ways I could use this Substack and different ways I can explore the topics I’m interested in writing about. And to do things that scare me! So, without further ado, please enjoy this short story that I wrote last year for an online writing workshop I did with Jen Campbell (who I highly recommend if you’re looking for an affordable individual or group writing workshop with thoughtful prompts and detailed feedback on your work). After the story, I’ll share some thoughts I’m still working through about family stories and silences, and the urge to try and fill the gaps that are left.
To briefly set the scene: in the piece of fiction writing below I’ve taken the few facts I know about my maternal grandmother’s childhood, or have discovered through family history research, and used them to imagine how it might have been.
Shorthand
Edith sat near the top of the stairs, trying to smooth out a crease from her new black dress, and listening to Aunt Fan and Mam talking in the front room. Her brother leaned against her, half asleep, exhausted after staying up late last night at the wake. He was Little Sid now, to their uncle’s Big Sid. Big Sid was only a year older than Edith, and sitting one step above her on the stairs.
“So what will you do now?” Aunt Fan said to Mam. Edith bristled with anger on Mam’s behalf: the funeral had only been the day before. Yesterday morning they had left their little house near the docks for the last time, following the coffin out to the waiting hearse, and today they had woken up in Nan’s house with a crowd of uncles, aunts and cousins.
“I’ll get a job,” Mam replied. “Mam’s said she’ll take on Edie and Sidney, so I’ll see if Mr Henderson will take me back on in the typing pool at the Corpy. It’s not that long since I left.”
When Mam said mam she meant Nan, who was Mam and Aunt Fan and Big Sid’s mother. Mam was Lil now, to everyone except Edith and her brother.
“It’s been eight years Lil,” Aunt Fan pointed out, sounding doubtful. There was a rustle of cloth and a small noise of protest: she must have been shifting Baby Bobby to her other breast. He was 3 months old with big blue eyes and a tuft of blonde hair, and everyone seemed to expect Edith to coo over him. They kept asking if she wanted to hold him, but he was noisy and smelly, and she thought he was useless.
“I reckon he’ll still take me back,” Mam said mildly. “Shorthand’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget how to do it. And Mr Henderson always had a soft spot for me”.
“He’s not the only one,” Aunt Fan said, cackling. Edith frowned. People were always saying things like that about Mam. Everyone seemed to like Mam. Edith thought that she had a smile that lit up her face like candles, and she wanted Mam to keep it for her and Little Sid, not sprinkle it around like confetti. Uncle Arthur had told them Mam was a heartbreaker, and Little Sid had asked Mam if that was why Da had a weak heart. She had gotten very cross and demanded to know who had told them that, and hadn’t spoken to Uncle Arthur for a month afterwards. But that was before, when Da was only in the hospital.
Big Sid nudged Edith with the toe of his boot. “Arthur says your da was a sailor,” he said.
“My Da worked in the tram depot,” Edith said firmly. Before he stopped working anywhere. Before he’d started feeling tired all the time and gasping for breath every time he stood up. Before he’d started coughing up blood. Before he’d disappeared into the hospital and never come back out.
She pushed Big Sid’s boot away, dislodging Little Sid’s head from her shoulder. Her brother woke with a start, hunching away from her and their uncle to resettle his head against the bannisters. His wrists stuck out of the sleeves of his too-small black jacket, pale and freckled and somehow fragile. He made Edith think of a baby bird, all eyes and a bottomless pit of questions she didn’t have the answers to. It made her angry. He made her angry, but then so did Mam, and Nan, and Aunt Fan, and Uncle Arthur, and most especially Big Sid. She glared at him, daring him to continue.
Big Sid shrugged, unconcerned by her death glare. “I know,” he said mildly, “it’s just what Arthur says. And he says, how did you come out so dark when Lil’s blonde and your da and this one are carrot tops?” He jerked his head at Little Sid, who seemed to have dozed off again.
Edith’s hand went to her hair before she could stop herself, fidgeting with the black clip holding her fringe off her face. Her hair was dark, so dark brown as to be almost black, and poker straight, nothing like Mam’s blonde wave or her brother’s ginger curls. Mam and Little Sid went pink in the sun, and Da had too, whereas she turned sun-kissed and golden. Uncle Arthur had called her a peach once, and asked Mam which tree she had fallen from. Edith took a deep breath and let it go raggedly, clenching her hands on the hem of her dress. Distantly, she noticed that they were shaking.
“Me and Bert and George have dark hair,” Big Sid continued, naming two of Edith’s other uncles, blithely unaware of the growing storm in the shape of a girl sitting next to him. “And Lil and Fan and Arthur are blonde, and no one ever thinks there’s anything strange about that”. He kicked his feet against the edge of the step Edith was sitting on, making a drum roll noise.
It set her teeth on edge, even as she decided that actually she hated Uncle Arthur more than Big Sid. But Uncle Arthur was a grown up, untouchable, while Big Sid was nine years old and only an inch and a half taller than her. Edith elbowed him hard in the stomach and leapt to her feet, ignoring his cut off gasp of pain. “I hate you Sid Furnival!” she yelled. She grabbed both his ankles and yanked, sending him sliding down the stairs, too surprised and breathless to grab on to the bannisters to stop himself. Big Sid’s head bounced against each step as he went down, the rhythmic noise loud and sudden in the quiet hallway, echoing the drumroll he’d made with his feet. He came to rest on the tiles at the bottom of the stairs in a jumble of limbs. There was a single clear moment of stillness where Edith thought wildly that she had killed him, before he was sitting up and gasping for breath, and Mam was there in the doorway to the front room, demanding to know what was going on.
Edith clattered down the stairs, stepping over Big Sid and lunging for the safety of Mam’s arms. Her anger was mutating, transforming into an aching, gaping hole in the centre of her chest that threatened to pull her to pieces. Her breath caught on a sob, and then she was crying into Mam’s black mourning dress, hiccupping. “Da’s dead Mam,” she wept, “Da’s dead”. She didn’t know how to put into words the fear that had sprouted from Big Sid and Uncle Arthur’s words, a knife blade of knowing that somehow she didn’t quite fit, didn’t quite belong in the same way that Mam and her brother, Nan and Aunt Fan and Big Sid seemed to.
Mam’s arms went round her, tight and grounding, as she smoothed Edith’s bobbed hair. “I know Edie,” she whispered, “I know”.
The Story-telling Animal
“Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them, but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.”1
Whether by inclination or circumstances, my mum's family were not storytellers. She told me some stories from her childhood, most of them linked to the small stack of black and white photographs that was tucked away inside an envelope in the hall cupboard. Some hazy memories of her grandmothers and great aunts. Like me, both her grandfathers died before she was born. Her mother, my nana, springs into being fully formed as a young woman in her engagement and wedding photographs in the 1940s. I don’t think I saw those photographs until after her death in 2009 and as far as I know, there are no childhood photographs of her. To me, growing up, Nana existed only in the present, cut loose from any wider family network or past. She was the top of the family tree, where we all started from.
Mainly, what I became aware of on Mum’s side of the family were the silences. The gaps where either something wasn’t known or it wasn’t talked about. I don’t know if Mum ever met her parents’ siblings; I’m not sure if I even knew that Nana had a brother. I picked up some impressions of Nana’s early life as I got older: her parents were in their late teens or early 20s when she was born, her father died when she was a child, after which she, her mother and brother moved in with her maternal grandmother. There were other things I knew about Nana that I never thought to question as a child: her apparent dislike for all men, her need for us to meet a set of social norms that were never clearly expressed.
In contrast, Dad’s side of the family were always telling stories. A great tangle of anecdotes about a multitude of great aunts and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents, second cousins and more distant relatives that I struggled to unpick. His mother, my gran, could expertly locate both herself and us within a densely populated family tree, telling stories closely linked to particular villages and streets in South East Kent. There were more photographs too, of both my paternal grandparents as children and of my great-grandparents in adulthood and old age. I suppose I’m taking after Gran in trying to unpick the silences in my mum’s family history and weave a story to fill in the gaps.
The facts that I drew on in the short story above are these: Edith (my maternal grandmother) was born in August 1921. Seven months earlier, her parents (Lily and Sydney) were married by licence at a Liverpool Register Offic2. Lily was 18 and Sydney 21, and based on the timings, it seems likely that Lily was already pregnant on their wedding day. It’s very tempting to assume that it was a shotgun wedding, arranged in a hurry before Lily’s pregnancy became noticeable. They had a son (another Sydney) in 1923. Edith’s father died at the age of 30 in December 1929 from heart disease.
“Every family has its tall stories -the inheritance that mysteriously disappeared, the wealthy connections lost to time, the exploits exaggerated or invented. I wanted to take seriously the family legends and romances I heard as a child and ponder their psychological truth.”3
After Edith died in 2009 we discovered what felt like a treasure trove of photographs of her as a young woman. Dad and I, inverterate myth makers, looking for patterns where perhaps there were none, began to wonder if there might be more to the story than just an unplanned pregnancy and a hurried wedding. We took the rather more tenuous fact that Edith did not particularly look like her mother, Lily, and the absence of any photographs of her father, and ran with it. As a young woman, Edith looks like she could have some East Asian ancestry, with high cheekbones and dark hair, while Lily in middle age has fair hair and rounder cheeks. Liverpool, my maternal family’s home for several generations, is a port city with a well-documented resident Chinese population dating back to the mid-1800s4. The story Dad and I wove was this: what if Edith’s biological father had been a Chinese sailor? What if Sydney had married Lily to help her avoid the social stigma and shame of being an unmarried mother with an illegitimate child?
There’s an obvious solution to this manufactured mystery which I haven’t (yet) pursued: taking a genealogical DNA test to find out if there’s any evidence of Chinese or East Asian ancestry in my genome. Partly this is because commercially available DNA testing feels like a bit of a Wild West enterprise to me - do I really want a private company to have a copy of my full genetic profile on file? But if I’m honest the main reason I haven’t gone down this route yet is because it would solve the mystery once and for all. The story Dad and I have crafted would potentially be destroyed. And it’s a story that feels ‘true’ to me on an emotional and psychological level, one that helps me to make sense of the way my nana was, of the silences and gaps in my knowledge of Mum’s family. I know the story could be - probably is - a complete fabrication, but if I don’t take a DNA test then it can remain possible.
“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.”5
James Wallis (2008), Making Games That Make Stories https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/making-games-that-make-stories/
There are various reasons why a marriage might take place by licence rather than by banns (which is when a public announcement of a couple’s intention to marry is read out in church on three separate Sundays in the three months before the wedding date), all of which are applicable in the case of Lily and Sydney. Lily was under 21, they were of different religions (Roman Catholic and Methodist) and Lily’s pregnancy may have meant that the wedding needed to take place as quickly as possible, or that their families may not have wanted the marriage be announced publicly in the parish church.
Alison Light (2014), Common People: The History of an English Family
The 1921 UK Census lists 2,419 Chinese-born residents, about a quarter of which were living in Lancashire.
Jonathan Gottschall (2013), The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human